Flaubert found his prior imagining of the Orient confirmed rather than corrected by experience.

Evidence

You [Flaubert’s mother] ask me whether the Orient is up to what I imagined it to be. Yes, it is; and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind. Facts have taken the place of suppositions—so excellently so that it is often as though I were suddenly coming upon old forgotten dreams. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 475

Categorization

• XREF: Launches the core Orientalism critique: the pre-formed textual imagination of the East precedes and absorbs actual experience, so the traveler finds confirmation rather than wonder — the mechanism by which orientalist knowledge reproduces itself rather than being tested.
• DEEPTHINKING: A compact statement of Orientalism’s self-fulfilling epistemology: prior representation governs what experience can find, collapsing the distinction between recognition and discovery. This is the load-bearing insight the whole book builds toward.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 475